Greatgrandfather must have
founded the mill; at the earliest memory of persons now
living it had been there forever. During father’s
boyhood it was an impressive industrial operation.

Virgin long-leaf pine timber was
cut and transported to the mill as logs, which would
sometimes square up 28 × 28 inches, sometimes 36 feet long!
There was machinery for primary sawing. There was a dry kiln
for lumber struck while squaring the huge
“export” timbers, and cut from smaller logs.
There were gang saws for ripping lumber, and a planer for
manufacturing finished lumber and molding.

Two boilers supplied steam, and
the mill machinery was driven off line shafts that were
turned by a reciprocating steam engine that must have
produced about 100 horsepower.

The mill commissary survived as a general store (1916).

Appendages to the mill were a
commissary (general store), a blacksmith shop, a grist mill
and a cotton gin. The last two were operated only in
season.

The foregoing, along with 7000
acres of timber, is a sizable collection of capital in any
age. How the complex was financed I have no idea; if there
were debts, no one now living seems aware of them.

Huge squared timbers were sold
for export at Pensacola; lumber for the domestic market was
sold locally, and shipped by rail from Rhodes Station on the
A&F Division of the L&N Railroad. (This division was
not opened until about 1898; before that, lumber must have
been carried to Georgiana for rail loading. The line from
Mobile to Montgomery, through Georgiana, was there during
the Civil War, and was one link in the first massive
movement of troops by rail: the removal of the Confederate
Army from Mississippi, and its transferral to Chattanooga.)
A sizable community was supported by the mill.

The mill and surrounding buildings.

Accompanying sketches show the
layout of the several mill buildings, the machinery layout
in the mill itself, and a rough map of the community. Only a
few of the buildings are shown—those associated with
the mill and the family. There were more. The community was
not a pretty one by present-day subdivision standards. The
structures were sturdy; there was an abundance of lumber and
labor. The architecture was “Sawmill American.”
Buildings were put where they were needed. The environmental
impact of the whole operation was that the virgin timber was
cut. That is all. There is no trace, today, of all the
activity. Only one building stands, Wesley Chapel Church.
The timber has regrown and been cut again several times. The
burial grounds survive.

The mill pond was the terminus of a trunk line for
transporting logs. Persimmon creek was dammed up so that it
formed a pond whose slews reached far into the forest. The
dam itself was of wood, and the mill straddled the creek
over the dam. Originally water power drove the mill; Grandpa
said the flow decreased until it was necessary to put in
steam. This seems unlikely; what more likely occurred is
that from year to year, more and more machinery was added to
the line shafts, and this demanded more and more water
through the turbine, and indeed, the mill pond level would
not keep up.

After steam was installed, only
the grist mill ran on water power. I saw a millstone and the
turbine shaft and blades to that mill lying in the yard of
the “home place” in the early 1950’s. The
millstones were there in November 1989, but we could not
find the turbine runner.

Logs were cut, not by chain
saws, but by axes and cross cut saws and men. They were
dragged, or carried on log wheels, by oxen to the water, and
towed to the mill pond. The pond was one “log
warehouse” from which stock was drawn to feed the main
saw. A chain with dogs on it would pull a log up onto a dock
behind the mill at the level of the saw. The carriage would
be backed out onto the dock and a log would be rolled with
cant hooks onto the carriage. A cable or chain, under the
control of the sawyer, and driven from the mill’s
power train, rolled the carriage past the saw. The carriage
wheels ran on inverted-‘V’ tracks. In many mills there was a
cut-off saw, a swinging cut-off blade, that cut the log to
length before work was started by the main saw. Father has
said there was no cut-off saw at Rhodes Mill. (There was a
swing saw for cutting butts to length for the shingle mill.)
Logs must have been cut to length as they were felled, or by
hand, before or after they were set onto the carriage.

Head blocks clamped the log to
the carriage.

After a slab or board was ripped
off, and the carriage returned to a position ahead of the
main saw, the log would be indexed over for the next cut. In
this, and all subsequent operations, the sawyer’s
judgment determined how many boards were cut and how thick
each one was. An on-line computer—the sawyer’s
brain—weighed many things to make the decisions. Among
the considerations were the board sizes needed to fill an
order or maintain inventory, the market for export timber
(the core of the log was usually squared up for this), the
myriad variations in the wood, itself, and given this
particular log, what cuts would yield the greatest
value.

The sawyer was a very important
man.

When time came to turn the log
ninety degrees on the carriage, the headblocks were
released, and a steam driven piston drove up a toothed bar,
called a nigger, which snagged the log, or timber, and
flipped it over. I do not know the origin of the word. (In
smaller sawmilling operations, the logs were turned on the
carriage by men with cant hooks or peaveys, the number of
men dictated by the size of the log. This is true today on
portable sawmills.)

Boards peeled off of the timber
by the main saw fell onto live rollers that carried them to
the track where they were loaded onto the dry kiln cars and
stacked, so that hot air could circulate around them
individually and remove their moisture. (As well as removing
moisture, the high temperature of the kiln alters the
structure of the wood so that it is more stable; it comes
and goes less with humidity.)

When only an export timber was
left, it was turned off the carriage onto other rollers and
transported out to a shed on the creek bank just below the
dam. It was rolled sideways into the creek. It floated
downstream to where these timbers were collected into rafts
for floating to Pensacola when floodwater came in the
spring. All year these timbers, and the rafts they made,
were collected along the creek.

Ruins of the mill viewed from the mill pond,
with the famous missing board below a window (1916).

On a photograph of the mill, and
on my sketch derived from it, there is a board missing below
a window that is over the creek. Father recalls that this
board was knocked off when one of the timbers went off its
rollers into the creek, downstream end first, instead of
sideways. The end snagged the bottom, and the upstream end
fell off, striking the mill wall as it did so. The shed
covering this timber dumping shelf has its roof fallen down
in the photograph. This followed decay and neglect during
the ten or fifteen years after the mill was abandoned and
before the photograph was made.

There was not the romance of a
log drive to the mill like one reads of in Maine and
Michigan; dammed-up Persimmon creek was a docile transport
artery for logs above the dam, but the running of rafts of
squared timber to tidewater deserves some romantic
literature. It was dangerous enough. The men who ran the
rafts must have developed traditions and maybe folk heroes,
but most amazing is that it was done at all. Those timber
rafts and their handling embodied “folk
engineering,” tuned to the medium to be
worked—heavy timbers and a flooded stream—that
evokes admiration as does an outrigger sailing canoe in the
South Seas.

Each timber must have weighed
three to seven thousand pounds. They were, typically,
26″ × 28″, and 28 feet long. (Their length was
limited, not only by the trees from which they were cut, but
by the length of the log carriage track in the mill. The
carriage track had to be nominally twice the length of the
longest timber squared. I do not know the track length in
Rhodes’ Mill.)

Two relatively short timbers
would be floated to form a ‘V’, pointing downstream; the
apex would be lap-jointed and pegged with split oak pegs
driven into auger holes. Upstream from the ‘V’ parallel
timbers would be similarly joined, stringing back behind the
‘V’. When long enough, the area that was enclosed, except
for the upstream side, would be filled with floating
timbers. Finally, a timber would be pegged across to close
the back end of the raft, and several four-by-eights would
be laid across the raft. They would be pegged to the outer
longitudinal timbers, and sawed off just outside. The raft
was not rigid, but its width was well defined by this last
operation.

A hut built of scrap lumber
protected the supplies, and possibly crew members, in
inclement weather. A hearth of clay would be shovelled onto
the raft near the hut for a fire for cooking, for warmth at
night, and for drying out water-soaked clothing and
bedding.

A pair of pegs at the bow were
fulcrums for a twenty-foot-long sweep oar, made of a
four-by-six, with a slotted end, into which a blade was
pegged. This sweep, deployed to the front, would stabilize
the raft when it entered fast water in shoals, and the raft
was moving slower than the water. Poles must have sufficed
when the fast moving raft entered relatively still water
below shoals, as I have not heard of protruding pegs at the
rear.

The pointed front end served no
hydrodynamic purpose; it could have been installed first on
the general notion that water craft are pointed at the
front. A raft’s forward motion, relative to the water,
was seldom fast enough for the outline shape to matter much.
It did, however, serve to sweep debris to the side, and to
deflect the raft sideways if a snag or bridge pillar were
contacted. But the forward deployed sweep oar was absolutely
necessary to prevent broaching when the raft entered fast
water.

A timber raft.

Father thought the rafts were
typically eighteen to twenty feet wide, and of the
proportions shown in the sketch. This would make them sixty
to eighty feet long. It is difficult to imagine maneuvering
such a craft down a flooded creek with brush crowding its
banks. However, if he were wrong by a factor of two, and the
rafts were only ten feet wide, the operation was still an
impressive one. I have asked Aunt Bessie about the size of
the rafts recently (1984-85). Once she pointed out the width
on the floor of the building we were in. It was about twenty
feet. However, she remembered the proportions that would
make them thirty or forty feet long. I expect Father’s
recollection is the better. He was older, and interested in
the operation when he last saw them. He was allowed to ride
a raft over the stretch before the creek entered the
river.

After construction, the raft
would then be poled downstream and tied up in a long string
of similar rafts. All summer the string would grow, and on
through fall and winter, until spring rains flooded the
creek.

This string of timber rafts
represented an enormous inventory; how was it financed?
Could the domestic business carry everything for nine or ten
months while millions of feet of timber were rafted up for
the spring shipment? If so, why was not the pay-off big
enough, when spring came, to establish a family fortune that
might still be intact? Necessity bred some amazing credit
structures in the South following the Civil War. Most of the
people were farmers, and up until the 1930’s farmers
had year-long credit until their crops came in, lots of it
carried on open accounts. Those ten-month tie-ups of
inventory may have seemed natural enough to Great
Grandfather and to Grandpa, who lived in a land of farmers,
all with year-long credit lines.

Finally spring would come, and
the creek would rise. It would rise until it would flow
smoothly over the “lower dam,” a mile and a half
downstream, that Uncle Dan operated. One by one (to spread
the risk? or was the rate limited only by the rate crews
could be readied?) the rafts would move out into the stream
with a crew of three or four men. They poled it to keep it
in the stream, and moving as fast as possible. Two pegs at
the ‘V’ in front would take a big sweep oar that stabilized
the raft in fast water; such a massive craft would come up
to water speed only slowly, and when the raft moved from
slower to faster water the sweep had to be put out to
prevent the raft broaching cross-ways to the current.

Women would wait on a bridge
downstream, each to see if her man was on the crew going
down. If so, she would pass his provisions to him as he
passed. That is how I heard it told. Undoubtedly, provisions
were put on board, along with rope, tools and other
supplies, before launching. What the ladies probably passed
was a last home cooked meal and a fond goodbye.

Sometimes a raft would wreck in
rapids, and the timber would be lost. What became of the
men?

At night they would tie up. A
crewman would leap ashore with a manila cable, wind it
around a tree to snub the raft. When the cable end came
round he would run with it downstream to another tree.

One man got his arm between the
cable and a tree; the flesh was stripped to the bone. Uncle
Marion Rhodes’ son, Tracy, was injured running timber,
and walked all bent over. He was in the hut on a timber raft
when something demolished the hut. Maybe the raft ran under
an overhanging log, or a low bridge. In any event, he is
said to have opposed the hut’s coming down on him with
his feet, while lying on his back, but was crushed in his
bent position. (Stacy later ran a pool room in Tampa.)

Persimmon Creek enters the
Sepulga river, the Sepulga joins the Conecuh, then the
Escambia, and the Escambia flows to tidewater northeast of
Pensacola. Father (under fifteen years of age) was allowed
to ride the rafts down the creek, but never down the rivers.
The dangers of the river must have been great, indeed.

Grandpa and his brothers and
half-brothers would ride to Pensacola, however, sell the
timber, and return by train. A tug (steam launch?) would tow
the raft from the head of the bay to the market where the
timber was sold for export, to England and Germany, I
suspect. Thousands of those timbers went out late in the
nineteenth century with NMRM&M CO branded on their ends.
(For Newton M. Rhodes Mill & Mercantile Co.)

At the market the timber was
paid for on the spot in silver—silver dollars. Grandpa
and his brother once sold their rafts and were walking on
the sidewalk in Pensacola, each with two sacks of silver
dollars across a shoulder, one sack in front, one behind. I
guess they were headed for the bank. Now, Pensacola is a
hilly town, as you can see today. It is, thus, not unlikely
that there was considerable slope to the sidewalk, where,
with a mighty
CLANG,
Grandpa’s front sack split, and spilled dollars over
the pavement.

The two men scrambled;
bystanders helped, and in the end only two or three dollars
were missing. But one dollar that was in sight was rolling
away, away down the sidewalk. Grandpa chased it; it rolled
between the ankles of a briskly walking lady, and settled
down to rolling at her speed. Grandpa dogged his dollar,
running forward a few steps, looking, then running forward
again. But Grandpa would not—certainly not—reach
under the lady’s skirts for it. Down the block walked
lady; behind her Grandpa cavorted, most strangely, it must
have seemed to people across the street; finally, the
block’s end came. The lady stepped into the gutter;
the cartwheel spun, then lay on its side; lady marched on
across the street. I do not know whether heads or tails were
up.

Lumber from the dry kiln was moved out on its cars. Cars
were unloaded, and the lumber set onto live rollers that
carried it back to the mill. Gang saws ripped the boards to
the several standard widths. Again, there was a sawyer; he
would eye the approaching board, and set his saws by setting
a lever for each saw into a selected notch. When that board
had been ripped into several pieces of standard width, he
would reset the saws’ positions to best rip the next
board.

The ripped, rough lumber would
be sorted onto wagons, and the loaded wagons would carry it
to the planer. The planer dressed four sides of the lumber,
and molded it if the product was tongue-and-groove flooring
or ceiling. (Panelling did not connote tongue-and-groove
panelling, as it does now. Sometimes walls were finished
with tongue and grove beaded ceiling, however; wainscots
were often so treated.)

The planing or molding knives
had to be changed or adjusted for each size and type of
lumber, but when it was running the planer only had to be
fed. The output was graded and either loaded for hauling or
stacked in the stock shed.

Father fed the planer when he
was ten or twelve years old; I have the impression that he
did not set up the machine. The end of a countershaft that
transferred power to the planer projected into the gangway
where one stood to feed the planer. Everyone banged his
knees or shins on it; no one had his overalls wind up on the
rotating shaft. Nobody, planer feeder or foreman or anybody
else called the blacksmith or millwright to cut off the
shaft.

Father was feeding the planer,
just inside the window, when the timber knocked the board
off the mill front.

Cants, or butts, are short lengths of timber that were
cut from logs too short for export timber, or were trimmed
from longer logs to make them fit the carriage. They were
sawn into shingles on a shingle saw. This was a horizontal
circular saw, with a carriage for the butt that moved
parallel to the plane of the saw. After each cut the
carriage would index down at one end, this end this time, at
the other end after the next cut. It dropped the thickness
of the saw cut plus the thickness of the butt end of a
shingle. Shingles, as they were cut, dropped away below.

When a butt was a big one, the
operator would steady it on the carriage until it had worked
down some.

Tom Cox wanted to be an
intellectual, but he was hampered by not knowing how to read
or write. He was guiding a butt while contemplating some
principle of philosophy, and failed to remove his hand as
the top of the butt worked down toward the saw. He was
gazing across the mill, deep in inattention, when—he
screamed; he clasped the erstwhile steadying hand in his
other hand; he sped through the mill and across the yard,
screaming he had cut off his hand.

Uncle Jule, I believe, caught up
with him, steadied him, said, “Let’s see it,
Tom, I don’t see any blood.”

After persuasion, during which
time all hands gathered around, Cox released his injured
hand; the injury was the trimming of one of his—always
long—fingernails.

Cox always carried a pencil
behind his ear and a time book in his hip pocket.

He would walk up to a group of
men in a discussion, listen for a few sentences, then end
the discussion with an authoritative pronouncement. One such
pronouncement was, “New Orleans, Mississippi is due
west of here.”

The Cox family lived in one of
the mill houses, the one that joined Grandpa’s
homestead. The Cox children would swipe Grandma’s
hens’ eggs off their nests.

Evolution of the mill and its power

I do not know when
the mill was started. In the 1850 Census, Greatgrandfather
is listed as a cabnet (sic) maker, and some $12,000 worth of
personal property is his. This is a large amount. Possibly
he owned machinery for his cabinet business, and possibly a
mill for that enterprise preceded the sawmill, maybe at the
same location. I cannot date the start of the sawmill, nor
the lumbering operation.

The Rhodes Mill in Shell, Alabama (1897).

A sepia photo dated (in ink)
1897 shows a very neat gabled structure from the mill pond
side. Greatgrandfather and some others, including Uncle
Jule, are standing on a sturdy, well constructed dock that
extended the length of the mill. A log is on a ramp from the
pond to the dock. This was when the mill was powered by
water. No boilers or smokestacks are to be seen. The log
carriage track must have extended out onto the dock; the
carriage itself is not visible in the photo.

Father asserted that the
building had two gabled roofs when he worked there, and I
have so sketched it. This suggests that the mill building
may have been doubled in size sometime after 1897, but
whether the extension of the building was over the mill pond
or downstream is not evident. My guess is that the addition
was upstream. Neither photo I have of the mill in ruins
shows enough to clearly confirm the two gables.

The mill was powered by water
until about 1900. Then steam was installed. The mill
expansion was probably coincident with the installation of
steam.

Persimmon Creek was the highway for arriving logs and departing lumber,
and provided power for the mill before the late conversion to steam (1916).

Water power from swampy
Persimmon Creek is hard to envision, although
“Persimmon Creek Swamp,” proper, is below the
site of the dam. Upstream there is a region of low hills,
and the mill pond backed water into the ravines between
them. The dam under the mill was built of wood, but there
were earth levees to the northwest. Somewhere to the
northwest were flood gates, a spillway and a fish trap.
Rudiments of the levee were visible when I visited the site
in the late ’60’s, when I located the sill of
the gin mill dam just north of the present highway.

The principal water power came
from a low-head water turbine, some five or six feet across,
and a foot and a half high. Gates around the sides
controlled flow into the turbine, and the several gates were
opened or closed by turning a shaft by a handwheel in the
mill, above. Water discharged under the turbine. The turbine
was in a well adjacent to the dam; the wooden well protected
it from debris.

In the last half of the
nineteenth century many such turbines were available
“off-the-shelf.” This does not seem to be
generally known, as there is a good deal of fanfare whenever
an “industrial archeologist” uncovers one. They
were available in various sizes, various designs. One series
of low head turbines was developed at South Hadley,
Massachusetts, in connection with the mills there at the
falls of the Connecticut River.

The turbine powered the main
saw, the gang saws, and miscellaneous machinery, but the
planing machine had its own source of power. It was powered
by a mill-built vertical-shaft water wheel. A wooden nozzle
sent a stream against paddles of wooden boards. Efficiency
must have been very low. When a log got into that
wheel’s well and damaged it, a millwright made a new
one. However, it turned fast enough that no great RPM
conversion was required to drive the high speed knives of
the planer. It is easy to imagine that if the planer were
added after the sawmill was going, and this homemade turbine
was constructed to power it, that this demand on the water
supply may have ended in the decision to install steam.

It could be that this train of
events led to the demise of the enterprise. Going to steam
was a sizable capital investment, and maintaining the steam
plant increased the cost of running the mill. It was just
six years after steam was installed that Grandpa left.
Greatgrandfather was dead. By that time his brothers had
other interests, except Uncle Jule, who stayed on and ran
the grist mill. (Uncle Newt and Uncle Dan had a store in
Georgiana; Uncle Marion was in Greenville; Uncle Dave had
disappeared.)

Father remembered the conversion to steam sometime
around 1900. It was a great event for him, but maybe it was
the beginning of the end. Two boilers were erected northwest
of the mill, and a shed was built to protect them and the
firemen. Two boilers were probably common practice, as their
feed water was creek water, and they had to be cleaned
fairly frequently. One boiler could probably handle most of
the requirements. A one-cylinder, double-acting steam engine
produced up to about 100 HP. (Approximate size: 16-inch
cylinder, two-foot stroke.) Steam made possible, too, a
well-controlled dry kiln. Previously, what drying that was
done was done in a primitive kiln in which a charcoal fire
was maintained in a pit under the stacked lumber. The fire
hazard was awesome. A separate, small boiler and engine
powered the gin. Only the grist mill, in the main mill
building was subsequently powered by water. It had its own
small turbine. The runner and shaft for this turbine, along
with the millstones were in the yard of the homeplace about
1954. The millstones were still there in
November 1989.

Steam installations like this
were common in that day. Hartley Boiler Works in Montgomery
made the boilers, and probably supplied the engine.

The boilers were fired with
slabs, shavings, some sawdust. What was done with this waste
before there were boilers to fire?

Father sometimes fired the
boilers, including maintaining the banked fires overnight,
when the only load on the boilers was the kiln.

The mill ruins.
Joseph Elmer Rhodes, Sr., stands with his family on the mill dock.
The smokestack for the steam boilers was once heard playing music (1916).

A strange occurrence involved
cleaning one, or maybe both boilers at the same time. In any
event, a firebox was cold and its door stood open while the
crew sat around eating lunch. The sound of a band playing
came from the open firebox door! Other men around the mill
were called, and men from the commissary came over. This
audience listened for what must have been several minutes,
and then the music faded away. Someone said it was the
Auburn band, that he would recognize it anywhere. And so the
notion spread around that the Auburn band was heard playing
down the mill smokestack. It was believed that some
verification was made, that it was somehow determined that
the band was, indeed, playing that piece at that time of day
on that date. I expect that everyone thought someone else
verified the facts. Twenty-five years later, when some
people were beginning to get radios, I heard the story
repeated and someone sagely remarked that way back then
“someone must have been experimenting.”
Experimenting or not, Auburn band playing or not, I cannot
account for what is said to have occurred. Could wind
blowing across the top of the smokestack have produced a
plaintive sound enough like an early gramophone?

Maintenance of this collection of machinery required
skills that may have stressed the available supply. An
itinerant artisan from New England was welcomed by the
management, if only grudgingly accepted by the community. Ed
Lawrence turned up with a tent, a kit of tools, a woman, and
some children. The community was not certain the woman was
his wife. One of the children, a ten or twelve year old
girl, was cared for, however, by the local doctor when she
was bitten by a copperhead one evening as she walked up the
road and hill east of the creek (the gin hill).

The Lawrences lived for awhile
in their tent and in “the doctor’s
office,” a one-room frame structure on the commissary
grounds. There is absolutely no question that the mill
management found Ed Lawrence indispensable; the Lawrences
subsequently boarded with Grandpa and Grandma in the
“home place.” Aunt Bessie remembers Mary
Lawrence, the daughter, helping make a bed, when Mary got
exasperated at something and bit her!

Lawrence claimed to be an
out-of-favor son of the family that founded Lawrence,
Massachusetts. Maybe he was. There was no question, however,
that he could fix anything in the mill.

Father recalled, one winter
morning, finding the lubricator on the steam engine split. A
lubricator was a brass oil cup with a sealed lid, mounted on
the steam line to the engine, or, sometimes, it was mounted
on the steam chest. Two capillaries connected its interior
with the steam; one entered the bottom, the other the top of
the cup. A needle valve closed one capillary when the engine
was not operating, but during operation, steam would enter
the lower capillary, condense and enter the cup as a drop of
water. This would force a drop of oil out the top capillary
into the steam line. Oily steam lubricated the piston.

Water in the lower part of the
cup had frozen and split the cup. The mill was down until a
replacement could be shipped from Montgomery, or the split
one was repaired. Lawrence got his blow torch. Fueled by
alcohol, gasoline, or what, I do not know. He asked worried
management, whoever was in charge that morning, for a dime.
There was showmanship in his style. Then, with the dime, he
silver soldered the split in the lubricator.

He could pour Babbitt bearings;
he could set planer and molding knives; he could sharpen
tools, saws, and molding knives. Local millwrights could do
most of these things, too, but none with the élan of
Ed Lawrence. I suspect that alignment of machinery, which
was becoming more complicated, may have been beyond local
mechanics. Ways, or tracks, for the main saw carriage had to
be true and perpendicular to the saw arbor, a formidable
task without special instruments, but nothing mechanical was
beyond Lawrence.

The Lawrences drifted on after a
year or so, before Grandpa took his family to Birmingham in
1906. Father recalled mill people wishing he were there when
mechanical problems arose.

Father also recalled, as a boy,
a suit against the mill for cutting timber on someone
else’s land. He recalled Greatgrandfather (who was
reputed to be learned in the law) saying, “You boys
are going to lose this suit because—. You should have
done—.” He neither understood nor remembered why
and what. He did recall that the judgment was for some
$8000, an enormous amount at that time.

I do not know when the mill ceased to operate. Having to
pay the judgment may have helped end the operation, although
Daddy did not seem to think so, and Grandpa had enough
capital to start in business once he came to Birmingham.
Greatgrandfather died in 1901, and Grandpa left for
Birmingham in 1906. Uncle Newt and Uncle Dan were then
already living in Georgiana; the cornerstone on the building
that was their store carries the date, 1906. Uncle Marion
had long since moved to Greenville. Only Uncle Jule was
left; he did run the grist mill for some time. I do not know
if he ran the sawmill after 1906.

Store operated by Uncles Dan and Newt in Georgiana, Alabama (1897).

Father said they sold out to
Forshee & McGowan when most of the timber they had
remaining was located where it would have been expensive to
harvest. Possibly McGowan was able to run log railroads to
get it from the other side more economically. The Rhodes
never laid rails, never owned a log locomotive.

Father loved the steam
installation, and he took pleasure in talking of it during
my childhood and youth. He may have failed to notice that it
required much more maintenance and attention than did the
water power. Maybe the operation was not viable after steam
was installed, especially with most of the timber cut.

Newspaper Articles

From the Mobile Press Register, Jan. 3, 1965

A TOWN VANISHES
INTO PAST by Ford Cook

GEORGIANA, Ala. — There probably is not a man
alive in this early part of 1965 who recalls, to any great
extent, a thriving town to the east of here known as Shell,
Ala.

A number most likely can be
found, however, who know about Rhodes’ Mill — as
the town was more commonly known during its heyday. Today a
few mounds of earth, with huge trees growing from them, mark
the site of the once thriving town.

At the spot where Alabama
Highway 106 crosses Persimmon Creek, about five miles east
of here, is where Shell (Rhodes’ Mill) was situated,
but to the casual passerby there is no indication of ever
having been anything more than heavily timbered lands, as is
seen today. A big dam, all but completely gone, has long
since deteriorated to the extent that the creek rushes along
its way unhampered and where fishermen once angled for the
“big ones” in the mill pond now stand large pine
and oak trees.

THRIVING TOWN

About a century ago, with the dam holding the waters of
the creek to provide power for various activities, Shell was
a thriving town with stores, a sawmill, cotton gin, grist
mill, a hotel, post office and other business and
residential facilities, in addition to the
“fisherman’s paradise” in the huge
Rhodes’ Mill pond behind the dam. Timber from the
surrounding lands furnished the raw materials for the
sawmill and as the timbering operations left the lands
barren, farmers moved in to till the soil and grow cotton
which gave rise to the need for a cotton gin and grist
mill.

These three major functions
continued to operate a number of years by water power, but
then steam became a more practical power for the sawmill and
cotton gin. These two industries flourished still more with
the installation of steam power and the grist mill grew even
larger, adhering to water power.

As more and more farmers moved
into the area and timber in the immediate vicinity of the
mill became scarce, the grist mill and cotton gin appeared
to be taking the upper hand of the industry until the Rhodes
Brothers, operators of the mills, put in “log
roads” — private railroads — to haul
timber from distant points to the mill to keep it going.

SAWMILL
CLOSED

With the advent of steam and the new “log
roads,” Shell (Rhodes’ Mill) appeared to be on
solid footing and continued its upward progress for a few
years. Then, almost with unprecedented suddenness, the
sawmill ceased to operate. Some say it was because no more
timber was available while others say it was because there
was no market for the lumber being cut. But, nonetheless,
the sawmill did cease to operate, leaving only the cotton
gin, which was a seasonal industry, and the grist mill,
which by this time had many competitors within its
territory.

With the folding of the sawmill
Shell began to go rapidly into reverse. Businesses closed,
the post office discontinued its service and other
facilities ceased operation in rapid order until the town of
Shell (Rhodes’ Mill) became a ghost town in almost
every respect. Being a seasonal industry, the cotton gin
soon ceased to operate, but the grist mill did hold on for a
number of years until age and deterioration caused it to
discontinue operations.

There are few men around today
who can recall, first hand, the flourishing town of Shell,
but many do have some recollection of the “old mill
pond, the deserted buildings and the grist mill,” that
were on the site until about 50 years ago.

Now, as traffic flows swiftly
across the modern bridge over Persimmon Creek, only a few
feet to the south of the old dam, but few realize they are
passing the site of a once flourishing town.

NOTES: The location of the mill is not Highway 106, but
County Road 16, roughly parallel and three to five miles
south of 106. This road, also paved and graded since WWII,
runs southeast out of Georgiana, past the cross-roads of
Avant, and on across Persimmon Creek, at the mill site. (See
accompanying map.)

Rhodes Brothers did not use a
steam log road. W. T. Smith, at Chapman did, however. Only
hard-to-get-at virgin timber was left when the Rhodes
Brothers sold to “Forshee and McGowan,” I have
heard said, about 1906. McGowan owned W. T. Smith, and it is
possible that they extended their log roads to get out that
timber. If so, they processed it in their own mill. I do not
think the sawmill at Shell was operated after the sale. The
grist mill, operated by Uncle Jule, did continue, as said
above, driven by water power.

From Mobile Press Register, July 4, 1965

INTEREST IN A
TOWN THAT DIED By FORD COOK

GEORGIANA, Ala. — It seems that, basically, one of
the most popular subjects, taking all phases into
consideration, for the reader today is history. Delving into
the things of the past, both recent and back into the dim
recesses of man’s existence, seems to be a favorite of
a number of persons.

Whether these observations be
accurate or purely figmentary, an item of history concerning
“A Town Vanishes Into Past,” which it was my
pleasure to do six months ago, has brought many comments
from persons who were themselves seeking information on the
former town of Shell, Ala.

The comments and queries, coming
from three states — Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia
— have been spread over nearly the entire six months
since the article appeared, but the most prominent have been
from relatives of the men who operated the sawmill, cotton
gin and grist mill at the site of the town when it was a
flourishing business and industrial center about a century
ago.

SOME COMMENTS

To refresh the memory of those who may not recall the
item about Shell, Ala, it was a town of “considerable
size” located about five miles east of here on
Persimmon Creek at the spot where modern Alabama Highway 106
crosses the stream. At that point today, nothing more than a
few mounds of earth can be found where once was a gigantic
dam to provide waterpower for the industrial operations.
Huge trees now are growing where the town was situated until
about 50 years ago.

From J. Elmer Rhodes of
Birmingham comes the comment: “I am the son of one of
the ’Rhodes Brothers’ who operated that mill and
I worked in it as a boy. I have many fond memories of my
boyhood days in that town.” And from his son, J. Elmer
Rhodes, Jr., of Marietta, Ga. comes this comment: “I
have, for a number of years, been casually collecting
material on that community, on great-grandfather N. M.
Rhodes, who founded the mill, and on the engineering that
went with the operation. Your remarks agree in all
essentials with my data, and I, in hopes of learning more,
am curious as to the sources of your story.”

Others were basically ones of
reminiscence about the town and others they knew of that
were similar as they offered comment on the item about
Shell, Ala., or Rhodes’ Mill, as it was more commonly
known.

To the younger Rhodes, who
sought the source of my information, it can be said:
“It is a small world,” because my ancestors
settled in that general area nearly 150 years ago and some
of them have remained in that part of Butler County since
that time. In fact, my birthplace was on a farm less than
five miles to the east of that old town’s site, but
nothing was left of the town at that time.

NO RECORDED
HISTORY

Most of the information concerning Shell (Rhodes’
Mill) was given to me by three persons — my granddad,
the late H. B. Cook, who would have been 106 years old now
had he lived these last 12 years; my uncle, W. L. Cook, 80,
who still resides at the “old home place,” and
my dad, E. B. Cook, 73, who spent his boyhood in the
area.

Granddad often told of going to
the mill, gin and grist mill operated by the Rhodes Brothers
as well as many successful fishing trips on the mill pond in
his younger days. My dad and uncle can recall much of the
town’s activities during its later years, though it
had already passed its peak of operation.

Actually, my information on the
town was basically a “family affair,” much the
same as with the inquiring younger member of the family of
the original operators of the town’s business and
industrial facilities. So far as my efforts have been able
to ascertain, there is little or no recorded history
concerning Shell, thus the main part of available
information on it must come from those who recall frist hand
or were told by those who did see it in operation.

To those who took the time to
offer comments and make inquiries concerning the town of
Shell, Ala., let us say, “It is
appreciated.”

NOTES: I noted two headstones in the “Riley
Cemetery”, probably in 1968. Both close to
Greatgrandfather’s grave, I believe. On one: H. B.
Cook 1858-1952. The other was for his wife, Florence,
1866-1901. Aunt Ethel said, ” Henry Cook was Cousin
Ellen’s brother; his wife was Florence; their children
were Willie, Roxie and Lena”. There is a good chance
that Henry is H. B., Ford’s granddad, and that Willie
is Ford’s uncle, W. L.

Cousin Ellen was Jeff
Hudson’s wife. I knew her in Montgomery when I was a
child. Her son, Jeff, older than I, runs an office supply
store in Dothan, Ala.